Capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing
For other uses, see Empathy (disambiguation) and Empath (disambiguation).
Not to be confused with Sympathy or Empath.
Hugging someone who is hurt is a signal of empathy.
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Empathy is generally described as the ability to take on another's perspective, to understand, feel, and possibly share and respond to their experience.[1][2][3] There are more (sometimes conflicting) definitions of empathy that include but is not limited to social, cognitive, and emotional processes primarily concerned with understanding others.[2][3][4] Often times, empathy is considered to be a broad term, and broken down into more specific concepts and types that include cognitive empathy, emotional (or affective) empathy, somatic empathy, and spiritual empathy.[2][3]
Empathy is still a topic of research. The major areas of research include the development of empathy, the genetics and neuroscience of empathy, cross-species empathy, and the impairment of empathy. Some researchers have made efforts to quantify empathy through different methods, such as from questionnaires where participants can fill out and then be scored on their answers. Some other research discusses the effects of empathy, benefits and issues caused by a lack of or an abundance of empathy.
Discussions of empathy are common in the fields of ethics, politics, business, medicine, culture, and fiction.
^Bellet PS, Maloney MJ (October 1991). "The importance of empathy as an interviewing skill in medicine". JAMA. 266 (13): 1831–2. doi:10.1001/jama.1991.03470130111039. PMID 1909761.
^ abc
Rothschild B, Rand ML (2006). Help for the Helper: The psychophysiology of compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma. Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-70422-8.
Read H (August 22, 2019). "A typology of empathy and its many moral forms". Philosophy Compass. 14 (10). doi:10.1111/phc3.12623. S2CID 202396600.
Chism LA, Magnan MA (2009). "The relationship of nursing students' spiritual care perspectives to their expressions of spiritual empathy". The Journal of Nursing Education. 48 (11). United States: 597–605. doi:10.3928/01484834-20090716-05. PMID 19650610.
^ abcHall JA, Schwartz R, Duong F (January 2, 2021). "How do laypeople define empathy?". The Journal of Social Psychology. 161 (1): 5–24. doi:10.1080/00224545.2020.1796567. ISSN 0022-4545. PMID 32870130.
^Hall JA, Schwartz R (May 4, 2019). "Empathy present and future". The Journal of Social Psychology. 159 (3): 225–243. doi:10.1080/00224545.2018.1477442. ISSN 0022-4545. PMID 29781776.
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narrative empathy. Defined by Taylor et al. in 2002–2003, individuals experience narrative empathy when they are able to feel with (emotional empathy), take...
The simulation theory of empathy holds that humans anticipate and make sense of the behavior of others by activating mental processes that, if they culminated...
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